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A
AIR-Chayah
Inspiring
October 16, 2013
Question

RoboHelp 10: Problems generating Printed Documentation

  • October 16, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 5385 views

Environment

Windows 7 Enterprise, Service Pack 1, 64-bit operating system

Office Professional Plus 2010 Versions 14.0.7106.5001 (64-bit)

RoboHelp 10: 10.0.0.287

Visual Studio 2010 Professional. I open RoboHelp from within Source Control (have been doing it for two years).

Problem

Sometime after moving to RoboHelp 10, and even after successfully generating Printed Documentation output, I encountered a major problem generating Printed Documentation from RoboHelp: “Internal error encountered. Failed to generated Printed Documentation”. The error occurred when I tried to generate Printed Doc using my default TOC, which looks something like this:

Topic A

Topic B

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Topic C

Topic D

Based on an old Peter Grainge reply to someone about a similar problem, I removed all but the first topic from the Chapter Layout pane and generated the Help. Everything was fine until I got to the topics after Book 3. At that point everything started to fail again. When I removed Topics C, D, etc. from the Chapter Layout pane, the output was built successfully.

I tried moving Topics C, D, etc. to the top of the Chapter Layout pane, and got the same error. I tried creating a new folder and put Topics C, D, etc. into that folder. Failure after failure.

As an experiment, I removed all the Topics C, D, etc from the Chapter Layout pane, but then added them to the Print Document Section Layout pane (not where I want them). The Printed Documentation built successfully.

During attempts to build with Topics C, D, etc. in the Chapter Layout pane, I kept getting a Word error: Word is trying to recover your information. After that there was always a failure.

Selecting PDF as the output did not work when the Topic C, D, etc. files were at the bottom of the Chapter Layout pane.

I create a new TOC and a new Printed Documentation SSL. Failed to generate.

As a matter of reference, I've been generating Printed Documentation from the same TOC for more than a year and so cannot figure out what has changed in RoboHelp or Word to cause this grief .

Has anyone experienced anything like this?

Carol

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 16, 2013

Does it work with one of the sample projects?

A
AIR-ChayahAuthor
Inspiring
October 16, 2013

Thanks for your reply, Jeff.

Yes, I created an "online manual", copied several single topics to the bottom of the Chapter Layout pane, and generated PDF and Word successfully.


However, I'm not sure that the test is valid: While I created this sample project locally, I work in my project in Source Control. In addition, the sample project contains significantly fewer files than are in my project.

Two of the quirks in my project are:

  1. I can generate the Word Printed Documentation for my project as long as I don't include the single topics that typically reside at the bottom of the TOC in the Chapter Layout pane.
  2. I can generate the Printed Documentation when I include those single topics from the bottom of the TOC in the Section Layout pane.

For a while I thought that it was because the "Critical error of Source Control Provider. Please restart IDE." message was hiding behind the application and I couldn't get to it fast enough to click OK. When you don't realize the message is hiding out on you, RoboHelp just sits there, waiting, and you end up thinking that it's crashed.

Since I'm also getting the "Microsoft Word is trying to recover your information" message (which I did not get with the sample project), I thought it might be a Word problem, perhaps related to the documentation template that is our default. But that makes no sense considering that I can build the Printed Documentation based on the two quirks above.

Carol

Carol

A
AIR-ChayahAuthor
Inspiring
November 14, 2013

I opened the project in RoboHelp -- without going through Source Control -- and changed the file name to "01_PeterCarol".docx". Results: "Internal error encountered. Failed to generated Printed Documentation." The error is preceded by this error: "Microsoft Word is trying to recover your information."

What version of Word did you use to generate the output successfully? As noted earlier in this thread: "Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Version 14.0.7106.5003 64-bit--Note: We repaired my current version of Word, in case that was the problem, but did not reinstall Office--we do not think that the Word version is the problem because we generated successfully with other TOCs and when generating individual documents."

Carol


Update: Problem resolved by installing 32-bit Microsoft Office.

Based on recommendations from Adobe Technical Support and Peter Grainge, my IT guy uninstalled 64-bit Microsoft Office and installed 32-bit Microsoft Office. I created a new Printed Documentation SSL using the default Touchstone Table of Contents (which had failed repeatedly) and successfully generated a single document.

From Peter's site::

“Windows 7 64-bit OS supports both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. Legacy 32-bit applications run in 32-bit mode, called Wow mode. Due to Windows architecture restrictions, any 32-bit application cannot interact with a-64 bit application. Currently RoboHelp 9 runs at 32-bit in Wow mode on 64-bit Windows OS. When RoboHelp (32-bit) tries to interact with Office 2010 (64-bit) it fails and RoboHelp thinks that Office is not installed.”

Here are some useful links for anyone dealing with 32-bit and 64-bit compatibility:

http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh9/using_rh9.htm

http://www.pcworld.com/article/197415/Office_2010.html (Beware of Office 2010’s 64-bit Shortcoming, written in May 2010, so some of the information may be a bit out of date)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/office2010/archive/2010/02/23/understanding-64-bit-office.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee681792.aspx (Office 2013 64-bit, updated July 2013, recommends 32-bit Office for most users)                                                                                                                       

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